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Video Games General

I now have a better potato laptop that can play XCOM EU five years after launch.I have to say that when they streamlined the game, they are not kidding since I have been playing mostly the clunky XCOM UFO. I don't even know why I was hyped for in this game in the first place because the soldier's shots miss at point blank.
 
BigBoom550 said:
WELCOME TO XCOM...

...

...

(PAUSING INTENSIFIES)

COMMANDER.

I have legitimately seen soldier's shots veer a good 35 degrees off target in XCOM 2. I don't care how bad a shot you are, at 35 degrees you're not even aiming at the same target.
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I've seen the soldiers aim their guns 90 degrees away from the target, and get a critical hit. On a pod just entering detection range, using overwatch, with a shotgun. XCom is kind of bullshit like that at times.
 
BigBoom550 said:
WELCOME TO XCOM...

...

...

(PAUSING INTENSIFIES)

COMMANDER.

I have legitimately seen soldier's shots veer a good 35 degrees off target in XCOM 2. I don't care how bad a shot you are, at 35 degrees you're not even aiming at the same target.
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Man, that reminds me of the hilarity in City of Heroes' animation system. It was typical old school tab target MMO with to-hit rolls made under the hood. Instead of just having a big red MISS sign over your target's head, for some ranged attacks your character's animation would actually change so you didn't hit them with the cosmetic projectile. Thing was, you didn't have a minimum range on most of the powers that animated like this. You could be standing literally right next to a baddie, and your character would suddenly point his arms up into the sky to fire their energy bolts over the enemies' heads.
 
The funny thing is that everytime my soldiers miss, I have this mental track of Mushu from Mulan saying "You Missed" phrase. That is actually a funny mod to make, the miss dialogue being Mushu complaining about the xcom operative missing, also going to be annoying.
 
Have I mentioned how much I fucking love The Legend of Heroes? I've been playing through Trails of Cold Steel on Steam for the last few weeks and I've completely fallen in love with the setting and world-building. I played a bit of Trails in the Sky on PSP but I put it down for some reason and never got back to it, probably because I never played my PSP much after I got my 3DS, but now I'm stoked to go back and play the whole Sky trilogy once I'm done with Steel 1, and the Steel 2 PC port supposedly comes out sometime late this year or early next year.
 
Smuthunter said:
Have I mentioned how much I fucking love The Legend of Heroes?
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I've been considering giving those a try, but I'm a little burned out on several common annoyances in JRPG (grinding and main characters having an annoying tendency of being generic, mainly). What can you tell me about them beyond good/bad?
 
aabbcc said:
I've been considering giving those a try, but I'm a little burned out on several common annoyances in JRPG (grinding and main characters having an annoying tendency of being generic, mainly). What can you tell me about them beyond good/bad?
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Well for one it has some really solid positioning-based combat, like the Grandia series or Skies of Arcadia. Every character can use spells, unique special attacks, and a limit break if you max out their special attack gauge, and you can customize a character's spell selection by equipping them with orbal quartz, which work almost exactly like materia in Final Fantasy 7 except that quartz crystals don't level up. Cold Steel also has a team attack system where you can link your characters together into teams of two and they'll support each other, like auto-healing after an attack or performing follow-up attacks on weakened enemies. There's not a whole lot of grinding involved, but I enjoy the combat enough that I might have done a lot of it and just forgotten because it never really annoyed me.

For characters and plot I'm going to stick to Cold Steel since it's what I'm most familiar with, but Trails in the Sky involves a whole different cast of characters unrelated to these guys.

The plot of Trails of Cold Steel is a lot like the first two volumes of RWBY, if you have any familiarity with that series. It revolves around a handful of students who enroll at Thors Military Academy and get sorted into an experimental group called Class VII. Traditionally Thors students are separated into different classes by social status, but Class VII is composed of both nobles and commoners, all of them from wildly diverse backgrounds, and almost immediately their personalities start clashing with each other in various ways and they have to learn how to get along and trust each other.

The group's adventuring is accomplished by having their teacher, an irresponsible but deceptively competent Misato Katsuragi-ish character, send them on field studies to various parts of the empire. There they perform tasks such as slaying monsters, helping the locals, getting mixed up in local politics, and generally growing as people, learning about the different parts of the empire, and eventually getting wrapped up in a shady conspiracy involving a terrorist organization.

The characters hit a lot of traditional anime character stereotypes to some extent but it seems like they do so mainly so they can later break those stereotypes in other ways. One of my first big surprises was how they kicked off the nobles vs commoners conflict, not by having the cold and aloof-seeming noble student (Jusis) get pissy about sharing a class with commoners like some washed-up Guiche clone, but by the hot-headed outspoken social justice advocate (Machias) take offense to Jusis's presence and be portrayed as being in the wrong for being the aggressor in that situation. Then there's lead female Alisa, who has a fairly typical tsundere moment early on when Rean, the main character, accidentally gets a face full of cleavage and she slaps him for it, only to later apologize for being such a bitch over something so inconsequential. Any character who looks like a pure stereotype is eventually proven to have more depth and complexity than is first apparent if you take time to get to know them. Even Patrick, the actual washed-up Guiche clone in this story, gets a dose of character development and becomes an ally of the group after spending a few months being a two-dimensional elitist snob.

But the greatest strength of the Trails series, and the main reason I now rank it higher than Final Fantasy on my list of favorite JRPG franchises, is the world-building. Geoff Thew did a great analysis of this in one of his Mother's Basement videos, so I'll link that here in case you have some time to kill, since he makes the case a lot more artfully than I can.



The short version is that the Trails series has better world-building than just about any other RPG on the market. It takes place in a rich Valkyria Chronicles-esque modern fantasy world in the middle of what's called the Orbal Revolution, which is like the industrial revolution but with commonly-available magic and in fast forward. Fifty years ago the Zemurian continent was pretty standard European fantasy setting, but thanks to the discovery of orbal energy technology has jumped ahead about 200-300 years by our reckoning so that now there are airships and tanks and radio and so on sitting alongside a society that hasn't caught up with that technology yet. This results in widespread conflict; the old aristocracies are now challenged by powerful merchants and mega-corporations like the Reinford group, and the advent of upward social mobility has brought commoners and nobility into conflict like never before since democracy isn't really a thing that's been invented yet.

The Trails series sells this world through two primary methods that distinguish it from other JRPGs. First, each game takes place in a single nation and centers on local conflicts involving that nation's politics, economics, religion, and so on rather than doing the Final Fantasy thing of having globe-trotting adventures but not really fleshing out any of those nations beyond the bare minimum. The plot of the Sky trilogy takes place more or less entirely in the kingdom of Liberl for example, while Cold Steel takes place in its neighbor, the Erebonian Empire. The plots of these games are also contemporary to each other; it's not necessary to play the Sky trilogy to enjoy Cold Steel but the events of Sky are referenced by the characters as recent history that they have an outsider's understanding of, and there are some reoccurring characters and NPCs that cross over between the stories.

The second method is the use of its NPCs, who all have their own stories and daily struggles playing out on the side of whatever you're doing. In Cold Steel for instance there's a family in the main town that has no plot significance whatsoever but if you talk to them you'll discover that the parents are having a domestic dispute and the kids are worried that mommy and daddy don't love each other anymore. Every time a major story beat occurs these characters will have new dialogue developing the situation, and other characters from around town like the other kids who are friends with the children of this couple will comment on what's going on with them, and there are dozens of such stories going on with other characters, not just this one. This makes the world feel like it's alive and fully-tangible and helps to sell the significance of these more local and personal stories.
 
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The oddworld games are on sale on Steam.

Grab that shit up.

Especially Stranger's Wrath.

Fucking love that game.
 
CptTagon said:
Shame

Shaaaame.

Oh well.
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...it cost me 3.44... including tax.

Seriously though, check it out, especially Stranger's Wrath.

Stranger's Wrath is this fucking weird Wild West styled first person shooter/third person platform brawle... you know what?

Here.



That shit was my childhood.

Your ammunition is literally 'live ammunition', and you have to catch it in the wild (or buy it with cash, you chump).
 
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I just went on steam at 8:21am this morning and spotted it so I went to download it before Fallout 1 for free is gone later today.
 
I spotted it on Imgur and got on steam and added it to my library. That said I own Fallout 1 and 2 on the original disks, so I could just as easily play those. Still this means if I can't find my disk for whatever reason I have an easy source to install it from.
 
Okay half an hour of playing Fallout, and man, they assumed you'd have the manual right by you, didn't they? I barely understand the controls, and there's no useful menu I found to help.
 
Games in that day tended to come with paper manuals, after all.
 
CptTagon said:
Okay half an hour of playing Fallout, and man, they assumed you'd have the manual right by you, didn't they? I barely understand the controls, and there's no useful menu I found to help.
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Yes. Here's a PDF of the Manual. All 121 pages of it. Complete with recipes (as in, for actual cooking) in the back.
 
The 'Life is Strange' complete collection is currently 5 bucks on Xbox.

I'm gonna see what all the fuss is about, and probably be horrified.
 
KinKrow said:
The 'Life is Strange' complete collection is currently 5 bucks on Xbox.

I'm gonna see what all the fuss is about, and probably be horrified.
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It's good. Drops the ball in the last few minutes, but, other than that, is a very good story. Also, there's some great porn of it (and not just the stuff I've written).
 
CptTagon said:
It's good. Drops the ball in the last few minutes, but, other than that, is a very good story. Also, there's some great porn of it (and not just the stuff I've written).
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My avatar doesn't disagree with you.

I know there's a drinking game where you play through from the beginning and take a shot every time you hear 'to cool for school' or something equally cringe inducing.

But yeah, I'm giving it a try.
 
KinKrow said:
My avatar doesn't disagree with you.

I know there's a drinking game where you play through from the beginning and take a shot every time you hear 'to cool for school' or something equally cringe inducing.

But yeah, I'm giving it a try.
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Check out Vortex Says, Slave Obeys for some 3D renders of a subby Max and a dominant Victoria.
 
So the new Warner LotR game came out hear somethings about it and I can only come to the conclusion that the devs are mind numbing edgy twats when it comes to the story.
 
red knight said:
So the new Warner LotR game came out hear somethings about it and I can only come to the conclusion that the devs are mind numbing edgy twats when it comes to the story.
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I would say they are more on the level of fanfic writers in that the story is either going to be a hit or miss with the stoey always falling apart when it is under intense scrutiny. Also not every writer for the LoTR franchise can be like tolkien who has academic experience on ancient cultures that he used as inspiration to his work.
I see it more as an assassin creed clone with LoTR stamped on it and I would guess may hold up to its own even if it becomes unrelated to the franchise.
 
mizerie said:
I would say they are more on the level of fanfic writers in that the story is either going to be a hit or miss with the stoey always falling apart when it is under intense scrutiny. Also not every writer for the LoTR franchise can be like tolkien who has academic experience on ancient cultures that he used as inspiration to his work.
I see it more as an assassin creed clone with LoTR stamped on it and I would guess may hold up to its own even if it becomes unrelated to the franchise.
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I can take fanfic but Shelob daughter of the abomination terror of my childhood turned into a dindu nuffin sexy lady makes me scream.
Also
Ringwraith Isildur and helm Hammerhand is pure wtf.
 
red knight said:
I can take fanfic but Shelob daughter of the abomination terror of my childhood turned into a dindu nuffin sexy lady makes me scream.
Also
Ringwraith Isildur and helm Hammerhand is pure wtf.
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I actually understand the feeling. Its why I don't consider the game any way related to the stories on middle earth and consider it a fanfic. Although Shelob being a sexy bangable babe is not as much surprising considering the target audience and rule 34.
 
mizerie said:
I actually understand the feeling. Its why I don't consider the game any way related to the stories on middle earth and consider it a fanfic. Although Shelob being a sexy bangable babe is not as much surprising considering the target audience and rule 34.
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I get sex sells but this thing
John_Howe_-_Sam_and_Shelob.jpg


Never just fucking never I freak out just looking at it.
 
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